Newton Poetry

So you went to an Apple store, made your purchase, sold your soul to some wireless carrier, and now you have tons of free apps downloaded and your voicemail is all set up. You’re an iPhone 3G owner. What makes you so special? It might be that you don’t have an Apple Newton MessagePad to play around with.

Here are ten eleven reasons to sell your 3G and take up the ten-years-abandoned Newton platform for fun and recreation:

1. It’s cheaper. The Newton MessagePad 1×0 series may cost you $15-30, while the 2×00 series might cost you $100-200. But that’s it. Except for wireless cards and the extra stylus, there’s no “plan” or “rate” to buy in to. You pay for it once. That’s it.
2. The batteries last longer. Way longer. Like, weeks longer. I’ve noticed that my 3G iPhone can last up to two days with light usage, but in the end I still have to plug it in. My Newton 110? I’ve lasted a month on the same Sanyo Eneloop batteries. No color and no wifi help, of course, but the point still stands.
3. You can fax. Faxing may be on its way out, or at least moving to the electronic world, but the MessagePad’s ability to fax – with the special modem – can be an advantage if (Steve forbid) wifi or cell towers ever went down. It could happen, and faxing lets you use the tried-and-true phone lines to do your communicating. Someone may release a faxing iPhone app, but in the meantime, your MessagePad has the market covered.
4. No in-store activation required. No lines, either, and if you use eBay, it’s not as scarce as you think.
5. It’s more rugged. Drop your iPhone and step on it. Now drop your MessagePad and step on it. Which would survive the fall and subsequent stomping? Place your bets.
6. Newtons qualify as “underground.” Retro. Rare. Counter-culture. Whatever you want to call it, the Newton fills the “not-everyone-has-one-so-mine-is-cool” gap the iPhone 3G left behind. Before, the iPhone 1.0 was the rare species, eliciting looks and whispers when someone whipped one out. Now, Apple is selling tons of them. Which means, like the iPod, the “coolness” factor dips a bit. Not so with your MessagePad. You could probably count on one hand the number of people who own one in your 50-mile radius. Kids these days love their retro and throwback technology – what serves that purpose better than a Newton?
7. It still has fun games on it. Every cell phone in the world has Tetris and chess and tic-tac-toe. So does your Newton. If your gaming style is “simple” over “Crash Bandicoot Racing,” keep your Newton around. Many games can be had for free.
8. You’ll never have activation problems. Maybe an error message now and again. But nothing on the scale of the “iPocalypse.”
9. You already have a system that works. Why switch now? If your MessagePad fits your GTD needs already, switching to the iPhone involves setting up a whole new system. I, for one, am still trying to decide on what flavor of to-do app I want to use on my 3G. Save yourself the hassle.
10. No AT&T involved. This goes along with point one, but really – any situation where you can avoid giant nation-wide media and communication carriers is a chance to show your shutzpah. Those of us who settled on buying an iPhone are still grappling with the catatonic depression that goes along with signing up with AT&T. And the fact that we had to wait in long lines to do so only strengthens the insult. Do your own thing. Hold your Newton tight.
11. Your Newton is a “project” device. This is what originally drew me to the MessagePad. Setting up wifi and Bluetooth, sending and receiving e-mails, playing around with third-party apps and games, even syncing with OS X – the Newton gives you weekend projects that satisfy your inner DIY’er. The iPhone? Too easy. Unless you’re an app developer or a jailbreaker – in which case, Mr. Jobs would like to have a word with you – the iPhone is a device of convenience and comfort. You don’t even need Apple’s permission to make applications for the Newton. All you need is knowledge of NewtonScript, an inner drive, and a mild case of masochism.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving my iPhone. Just the camera and the GPS are worth the madness that I lived through that Friday in July.

Anything I haven’t thought of? Have a different point of view? Let me know in the comments.

When iPhone developer Steve Sprang needed interface ideas for his new painting app, he looked to a platform he knew well – the Newton.

Sprang got hold of an MP2000 in college and created the Newton freeware app, Lathe, as a simple 3D modeler. Today, he’s working on Brushes – a “natural-media style painter” that, taking a look at the screenshots, looks like a beautiful, detailed app for the iPhone (examples of Brushes-created artwork can be seen at iArtMobile).

Sprang, a former software engineer at Apple, used the Newton’s undo/redo buttons (above) in his Brushes app as a nod to his former platform. Since he left Apple, Sprang has welcomed his new role as an independent iPhone app creator.

“Developing for the iPhone has been a good experience so far,” Sprang says. “I think it’s been a great move for me, and I hope to be able to do it long term — more projects are in the pipeline!”

Brushes is available at the iPhone App Store for $4.99.

Why call a music player an “iPod?”

Because, in time, that “Pod” will be much more than a music player. It will be a device to browse the web, play games, check e-mail, get things done, keep track of your contacts, and help you get fit with the right pair of shoes.

Is that what Apple was thinking when it first released the iPod in 2001?

Because that’s what an iPod is today. While the base model, the iPod Classic, is still mainly a music player, even it can play a few games and watch videos. The rest of them have become “pods” in the true sense of the word.

Back when the fruits of the iPhone/iTouch SDK were on display, it dawned on me that “iPod” is now the perfect name for what Apple’s media device does. It’s not an “iWalkman” anymore.

Essentially, the Newton MessagePad was a mini-computer: something to help you write documents and make up spreadsheets and track your contacts and do some database work. Yes, there were games, and yes, you could even listen to music – but it was primarly a work machine, even if the work it did was in your home.

The iPod, and it’s iPhone offshoot, is a consumer of media. You put stuff on it, or search stuff out, to keep entertained. That could be reading or music or TV shows or whatever. And you can get work done on the iPod/iPhone (e-mail, calendar, third-party apps), but it wasn’t made exclusively for work like the Newton was.

As months go by, we see more and more why “iPod” is a perfect name. Even if Apple didn’t intend it, it’s money-making media device’s name fits like a glove. You hold this thing in your hands, and it has access to the whole world. No wires! Like magic! It’s your pod – your iPod.

Anymore, the iPod Shuffle is the sole music-only device left in the iPod lineup. It does what it does, and nothing else, just like the original iPod did (in fact, Gizmodo argues change is bad).

The only true evolution of the Newton platform was the eMate, which included a built-in keyboard. Every other MessagePad kept the simple idea: scribble stuff on a screen with a stylus. The MessagePad got faster and bigger and could include more apps, but it essentially kept the original idea intact.

Not so with the iPod. Apple has driven it from a music player to a music player/video watcher to a music player/video watcher/Internet browser/App runner/Save the World device.

Part of me wonders whether some of this stuff – the shake to shuffle, the Cover Flow – is needed, when some basic issues of the iPod Touch/iPhone platform remain unresolved. Maybe because it’s easier?

Either way, the focus doesn’t shift totally away from music from here on out. People buy iPod mainly to carry their music around. But how much more can the iPod lineup evolve in terms of music? Most of the revolutionary stuff we’ve seen has come from apps and games and cloud computing stuff. Music is there, but it’s only a fraction of the “pod-ness” of the iPod now.

So the name fits even better – more so than iTunes, which controls far more than your tunes these days (“iDock” is more like it).

Is anyone worried about the dreaded “feature creep,” like Gizmodo is? Does today’s “Let’s Rock” event show the iPod’s attempt to cover too much?

Dr. Macenstine, over at the Macenstein blog, is launching another iPhone site – The iPhone Cheat Sheet to tackle “iPhone tips, and iPhone game cheats and strategy hints in particular.”

I’ve been a fan of Macenstein for a while now, enjoying the “celebrity Mac sightings” and “Mac chick of the month.” But this new blog is more in the mode of Blake and Arn’s Touch Arcade, focusing on gaming and the hidden gems in the Touch OS X interface.

I bet we’ll see more blogs highlighting the iPhone and iPod Touch’s capabilities. Touch Arcade came out with a great blog on gaming – but I can see GTD and mobile apps and hacking blogs on the horizon.

The idea for cut and paste on the Newton is simple: scribble a word, press the stylus on the word until the highlight marker appears, highlight the word, and then either (a) double tap and drag or (b) just grab the word and drag it to the side of the screen (above – but there’s a great video demo over at Mental Hygiene). Your “clipped” word will appear on the side of the screen, slightly smaller and truncated.

When you want to paste, simply grab the word with the stylus and drag it where you want it. It’s not true “cut and paste” because the word doesn’t disappear, but the effect is similar.

There is also “primary” clipping, says this site:

…which is the last clipping that you touched with your stylus. Some applications have “cut” and “copy” and “paste” menu options, for the benefit of people with keyboards — if you choose “cut,” a clipping is automatically created on the side of the screen and becomes primary. If you choose “paste”, the primary clipping is unhooked and pasted in.

But with screen real estate at a premium on the iPhone, a mini-word on the side might be too large still. How do you “grab” a word? Or highlight it? Can you have multiple items in your clipboard? Can we trust a cloud-based method, after MobileMe’s ups and downs? Will it be a third-party solution, despite Apple shutting down the OpenClip project? Is there a smarter way?

The technical side of cut and paste is far beyond my grasp. Besides, others have handled the explanation of how it was done far better than I could. But we can learn from the past. Just like the Newton and its standards (highlight, pull and drag, double-tapping for the keyboard, etc.), the iPhone has standard ways of doing things. Perhaps all that’s needed is a new standard, such as a hold-and-click, or like the keyboard buttons that MagicPad showed us.

But with evidence that copy and paste is on Apple’s to-do list, we’re left to wait it out.

Any ideas on how the iPhone should do copy and paste?

The AppleInsider reports that Best Buy will feature the iPhone 3G in this Sunday’s circular, earning a cover shot, even.

I had to drive to Ann Arbor, about a half-hour away, to grab my iPhone. But now Jackson will have them, along with a few Macs, at our Best Buy retail location. I might just have to make a trek to the mail and check it out.

Macenstein does a great, in-depth review of two iPhone styluses after figuring that drawing with a finger is too hard to do.

One is the Pogo stylus, which we’ve covered here before. The other is a Japanese Touch Pen Stylus. Dr. Macenstein puts the two to the test by drawing – of all things – Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Check it out. In the meantime, any thoughts on an iPhone stylus? Does it ruin the whole thing, or is it a good way to get your modern-day Newton fix?

Is Google’s Android mobile platform the Newton fan’s savior at bringing a Newton-clone app to fruition?

When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, I wondered whether someone could use it to develop an Einstein-based Newton app – even just to mess around with – for Apple’s Mobile OS X.

Because of the licensing agreement, a Newton app is probably impossible. But on the open-source Android OS and its new Android Market, the dream of a modern-day Einstein hack might be realized.

Now that Android has its own “app store,” some bootstrapping developer could do something really cool. A touch screen, a stylus, some sort of handwriting recognition, and access to the OS’s dates and contacts and notes, and you might be all set.

I’m positive its nowhere near that simple to develop a Newton emulator for a mobile phone. But one can dream, right?

Browsing through Apple’s App Store, I lucked out on a program I’ve been meaning to try: Catamount’s PocketMoney. Previously available for $9.99, Catamount dropped the price to $0.99 for a few days only, and I snatched it up as soon as I saw it. How could I resist? Catamount was a dedicated Newton app developer. They’ve ported their PocketMoney finance manager to everything from the Palm to the PocketPC, and it only made sense for them to bring their piggy bank to the iPhone.

More… »

Joe Rivera, serving in Iraq, over at Low End Mac:

I have both my PowerBook G4 and my black MacBook, but what I carry on me as part of my gear is my MessagePad 120. This is my second deployment with it, and I have it custom painted tan to match my old desert camouflage uniform.

Now that’s hardcore. Read the rest of Joe’s story, and why he doesn’t plan on springing for a new iPhone any time soon.